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I tried. I really did. I tried to like Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, and watched it again when it
was on tv this week, to give it another chance. Because it’s always felt like a
much lesser film than Alien to me. I
know some folk like it, prefer it to the first film even. But for me, where Alien wields the scalpel, Aliens wields the bludgeon. Where Alien is about interiors, tension,
horror, Aliens is about spectacle, action,
excitement. Alien is sharp,
economical, surprising, and quite British; Aliens
is forceful, long, unwinds to a fairly predictable conclusion, and is
Hollywood spectacle sf.
That’s not to say that I don’t find things to admire in Cameron’s
film. I like the audacity of hiding the aliens away for almost 90 minutes. The
last hour is gripping, well-paced, and has some iconic scenes, particularly
Ripley’s fight against the Queen. But the bad guy, company man Burke, is
cartoonish in his yuppie malevolence; the Marines are straight out of central
casting (weak, inex…

In this last post on Prometheus,
I am going to concentrate more directly on the mythic or religious implications
of the film, in particular the issue of Creation and the condition of innocence.
As I noted in part 2, one of the most ham-handed scenes in the
film is where Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), in emotional discussion with her
partner Holloway, reveals that ‘I can’t create’, breaking down in tears;
reproduction as ‘creation’ of life leaves a kind of spiritual barrenness, the
motivation perhaps behind the overt displays of faith (the crucifix she wears
around her neck, for instance). Another way to read David’s experimental
infection of Holloway with the alien DNA is to do something that he also cannot
do, which is to create life (Shaw and David are paired throughout the film);
not only is the android not a womb,
the android is also barren: neither a mother nor a father can it be. The connection between Creation and space fiction is a very long
one of course, and it is a signal…

‘There’s a Starman waiting in the sky/ He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds’
Before I turn to Prometheus,
a quick word about the androids in the other Alien films. The excellent Lance Henriksen plays Bishop in James
Cameron’s noisy Aliens (1986), and
was seen at the time as a revision of the android figure, almost an apology for
Ash. Ripley is deeply suspicious of Bishop throughout Aliens, but he is ultimately revealed to be a redemptive and heroic
figure. In the ‘knife trick’ scene, Henriksen puts his hand over that of the
‘grunt’ Hudson and whirrs a combat knife between their fingers: ‘trust me’, he
says to Hudson. During the course of the film, Ripley does indeed come to trust
Bishop, though she is antagonistic for much of the film, and on first realising
Bishop is an ‘artificial person’ (his preferred term) had threatened him and
told him to stay away from her. That Bishop insists upon self-definition, not
as robot but as ‘artificial person’, indicates …

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus:
‘a ruinously incoherent, inept dustbin of bad sf ideas, and in Clute’s words, a
real shaggy God story.’ That’s what I wrote on Twitter after seeing the film, which
was a very great disappointment for someone who loves both Alien and Blade Runner and
teaches both on a course on science fiction. I’m not going to recapitulate what
has already been written about the film, and in particular will avoid (a) its
Lovecraft-via-von Daniken story (b) the atrocious editing (c) the gaping plot
holes (d) the ludicrous portrayal of scientists (e) its seeming validation of
Creationism (f) the appalling and nonsensical ending (g) the risible deaths of
many of its characters, particularly poor old Charlize Theron who (h) had
absolutely nothing to do in the film but be the shoulder-pad-bitch, one of many
under-written parts which only served to highlight the deftness and skill with
which Scott once presented an ensemble cast in Alien, but which was entirely lacking here. I ca…